Welcome to Summer! …er uh, spring, or whatever Ma Nature calls this wonderful cool weather day
Grain market bulls caught a little glimmer of hope on Wednesday when the Tuesday night session finished in the green and the day session started out that way as well. Those hopes faded into worry when things went red very shortly after the start. They did come back to unchanged or a little higher at the close though. Whether it’s the fact crop conditions have started out the year really good this growing season in the Corn Belt, or funds have been massive sellers in recent days, none of that has been getting as much attention as the finger pointing at Trump and trade wars as the sole culprit. Of course, leave it up to the media bias to drive the narrative and not pay much attention to those other two factors as well. There is never a bad time to start evaluating what sources have a heavy bias 100% of the time and totally tune out those sources. The problem is, unbiased news is hard to find.
For narrative; beans were facing an uphill battle anyway. Corn? If the June final acreage report doesn’t show an increase in planted acres versus March, the bears could get stomped in the stampede.
Fund activity yesterday was estimated as buyers of 5k wheat and sellers of 3k corn and 4k beans.
Export sales numbers in the weekly report this morning were ugly for old crop corn, decent in soybeans and almost bullish in wheat. I say “almost” for wheat because they hit 17 mln bushels old crop today and that’s significantly better than the single digit numbers we’ve seen at times. I won’t call it bullish until the number tops 20 mln and with the long string of really bad sales weeks recently, 17 mln still doesn’t cut it to qualify for excitement. Corn sales were off sharply from recent weeks, coming in at 6.5 mln old crop and 13.4 mln new. Kind of the reverse situation of wheat though, because corn sales have been really good for a long time and this if the first legit bearish number in a while. Soybeans landed at 11.1 mln old crop and 8.4 mln new. Given the current trade disputes and where we’re at in the calendar with South America dominating the world trade at the moment, 11.1 is a good number this week!
After this brief reprieve from the blast furnace with some rains and a lot cooler temps today, it’s going to go right back to the blast furnace based on the extended forecasts. 6-10’s last night were showing above normal temps across the entire Plains and Corn Belt. Precip was normal to below for all of Texas and into SW OK and the Panhandle. Everywhere else was normal to above on precip and for some parts of the northern Corn Belt, that’s actually going to be way too wet still. Wish I could say that about my area where it’s bone dry still… Little ironic that we went from winter, straight into summer and now on the first day of summer it feels like spring!
Pete Loewen
Loewen and Associates, Inc.
Pete Loewen / Matt Hines / Doug Biswell / Matt Burgener / Alex Gasper
www.loewenassociates.com